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THE SOUTH OF TO-MORROW 

HER FUTURE IN MATERIAL WEALTH 
AND EDUCATION 



RECEIVED 



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AN ADDRESS 



*JUN 23 1910*) 



BY 



REV. JAMES W. LEE, D.D. 

Pastor of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church South, 
Atlanta, Ga. 



BEFORE THE THIRD ANNUAL EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE 

METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH SOUTH, HELD AT 

ATLANTA. GA.. MAY 19. 1908 






Pre 88 OF 
Allen, Lane & Scott 

Pb ILADELPHIA . 



By traaeflBi 

OCT 11 1915 



^^ 




THE SOUTH OF TO-MORROW. 



You could not possibly meet, at this time, to consider 
a question of vaster importance to the South than the 
one which calls you together. In all respects which con- 
cern the well being of a population located in a group of 
States, except in that of education, we are actually and 
potentially the richest 24,000,000 of human beings under 
the sun. Our weakness is our lack of education and of 
institutions of learning amply enough equipped and suffi- 
ciently endowed to give the rising generation such tech- 
nical, moral and intellectual training as is demanded by 
the age in which we live. 

Our overplus of all the elements which unite to make 
a people materially prosperous is simply amazing. We 
have in the South about 24,000,000 of people, living upon 
a territory equal to 30 per cent, of the total area of the 
country. And yet the South in 1903 was actually produc- 
ing 40 per cent, of the total exports of the nation and 
handling in Southern ports 35 per cent, of all exports 
going from American shores. New York, the largest of 
our Northern ports, has an export commerce equal to 
$327 for each one of its inhabitants, while Galveston, the 
largest of our Southern ports, has an export commerce 
equal to $2795 for each one of its inhabitants. Newport 
News handles five times as much commerce in proportion 
to population as New York city; Savannah and Bruns- 
wick each three times as much, Pensacola nearly three 
times as much and Wilmington and New Orleans each 
twice as much. 



According to the United States Geological Survey 
the South has a total supply of known iron and steel ores 
equal to those of all Europe and those from that part of 
the country from which we have been accustomed to get 
our supplies put together. 

We have a coal area of 62,000 square miles, while 
France, Germany, Great Britain and Russia together have 
only 42,000 square miles. Mr. Edmonds, of the Manu- 
facturers' Record, declares that there is enough coal in 
one of our Southern States, say Kentucky or West Vir- 
ginia, if it could be capitalized at only 10 cents a ton to 
equal $10,000,000,000. Enough to buy all the railroads 
in the United States, enough to pay the national debts 
of Great Britain, France and the United States, nearly 
enough to equal the entire banking capital of America 
and almost enough to equal one-third the entire banking 
capital of the whole earth. We have been receiving for 
the past five years $700,000,000 annually for our cotton 
crop alone, and this is only one-third of our income for 
agricultural products. 

We receive almost enough money every year from our 
fruits and vegetables to keep us alive, if we had nothing 
else. A gentleman in North Carolina refused $10,000 for 
15 acres of lettuce. There are single acres in Texas 
yielding $1000 a year in onions and single acres in 
Florida yielding $2000 a year in tobacco. 

Our poor little ground peas advertise our section from 
the peanut stands of every city on the planet. Our wa- 
termelons, wrapped in green rind sufficient to protect 
their big sweet hearts, are piling the sunshine and glory 
of the Southern climate upon all the dining tables of the 
American Union. Our peaches, dainty, sweet, beautiful. 



by their direct appeal to the tastes of those Hving in the 
frozen regions of the country, are being converted into 
milHons of coin for the pockets of our thrifty farmers. 
We surprise, in mid-Winter, the denizens of ice and snow 
in the North with car loads of real Spring packed in our 
strawberries and receive therefor enough money to keep 
the South blooming the year round. 

In addition to all this, the Southern people are now 
getting ready to put into operation the magnificent ex- 
periment of living without intoxicating liquors. This 
will enable them to add an additional item of $414,000,000 
to their annual income. For the nation's drink bill is 
over $1,242,000,000, and our one-third of that, supposing 
we drink as much in proportion as the other two-thirds 
of the people, will give us nearly $1,000,000,000 of pocket 
change every two years. When they cut the drink bill 
from their expense account the Southern people will lift 
nearly one-half a billion of money annually, hitherto used 
to fertilize appetite and passion, to create poverty, dis- 
ease and crime, into the service of legitimate industry. 

In 1878 Stewart L. Woodford, addressing the Cham- 
ber of Commerce in Boston, said : "Our nation is to grow 
bread for the world. We are to mine coal and iron for 
the world. We are to dig and refine gold and silver for 
the world. The stars in their courses sing this prophecy 
of coming commercial, agricultural and manufacturing 
success." When we think of the raw material of wealth, 
housed since time began, in our Southern mountains and 
mines and fields we know that the vast bulk of this com- 
mercial, agricultural and manufacturing success for the fu- 
ture must come from the South. Since 1878 the United 
States has had practically a new birth. It has been vir- 



tually rebuilt. Its structure business has been renewed 
and it is to-day almost as different from the United States 
of 1878 as the England of Edward VII is from the Eng- 
land of Edward VI. Is there any reason w^hy we should 
not in the next twenty-five years advance as rapidly as we 
did during the thirty years from 1878 to 1908? 

Applying the same percentages of increase to the whole 
country that are known to have prevailed between the 
years 1878 and 1908 to the years that are to come be- 
tween 1908 and 1933 we will find that twenty-five years 
from now we will have a population of 140.000.000, wealth 
equal to $270,000,000,000. money in circulation equal to 
$9,000,000,000, a foreign commerce equal to $6,500,000,- 
000, bank clearings of $400,000,000,000, bank deposits 
of $60,000,000,000, farm property w^orth $50,000,000,000, 
manufactured products worth $45,000,000,000, a wheat 
crop of 1.000,000,000 bushels and a cotton crop of 30,- 
000,000 bales. Take a third of this for the South, where 
we grow all the cotton, and where more of the raw ma- 
terial of wealth is found than in all the rest of the country 
put together, and we find that in 1933 we will have in the 
South a population of nearly 50.000.000. wealth equal to 
$90,000,000,000. money in circulation amounting to $3,- 
000,000.000, a foreign commerce worth $2,000,000,000, 
bank clearings of over $100,000,000,000, bank deposits of 
$20,000,000,000, farm property worth over $20,000,000,- 
000, manufactured products w^orth $15,000,000,000, and a 
cotton crop of 30,000,000 bales, which at 10 cents a pound 
will bring us an annual income of $1,500,000,000. But 
then we will not only be getting the price of the raw ma- 
terial of our cotton, but if we continue to increase the 
number of spindles in the South for twenty-five years 



according- to the rate we have advanced for the past 
twenty-five years we will have in 1933 enough spindles 
running to use up 12,000,000 bales of cotton, leaving us 
18,000,000 bales to sell to the rest of mankind. In addi- 
tion to all this, remember that by 1920 the Panama Canal 
will be completed, which will put our Southern ports at 
Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola. Panama 
City, Brunswick and Savannah next door to the South 
American Republics and next door to Japan and China 
and you can easily understand that it is only a question 
of a few years when the center of financial and commercial 
gravity of this country will be along the seaboard of the 
Gulf States, instead of in the neighborhood of New^ 
York and Boston. 

Here are enough figures on one side of our problem 
to make our heads dizzy. Look now at the other side 
where we are actually so poor that our bones may almost 
be seen breaking through the skin of our body. Harvard 
University alone has an annual income greater by $19,000 
than the incomes of all the colleges and universities of 
the South put together. Of the productive funds held 
by American colleges Southern institutions have not 10 
per cent, of them. Hundreds of millions of dollars have 
been going to Harvard and Yale, and Columbia, and Chi- 
cago, and Leland Stanford, and Washington, and the 
University of California for the past twenty-five years, 
while not $10,000,000 from benefactions alone have come 
to Southern colleges in the same length of time. George 
J. Hagar, in the Reviczv of Reviews, after careful investi- 
gation of the whole matter, ascertained approximately 
how much money or material representing money was 
given and bequeathed by citizens of the United States 



for religious, charitable and educational purposes each 
year for ten years, beginning with 1893. He excluded 
from the total all gifts and bequests of less than $5000 
in money or material. He excluded all State and Na- 
tional and municipal appropriations and all ordinary con- 
tributions to regular church organizations and mission- 
ary societies. What was left after excluding all these 
represented the purely individual benefactions. The fig- 
ures given below represent the gifts for ten years in 
round numbers : — 

1893 $29,000,000 

1894 32,000,000 

1895 32,800,000 

1896 27,000,000 

1897 45,000,000 

1898 38,000,000 

1899 62,750,000 

1900 47,500,000 

1901 147,360,000 

1902 94,000,000 

1903 95,000,000 

Making in all for ten years $614,410,000, or an average 
each year of $61,040,500. Suppose we use this amount 
for each of the past five years and we will have 

1904 $61,040,000 

1905 61 ,040,000 

1906 61,040,000 

1907 61 ,040,000 

1908 61,040,000 

Making a total of $305,200,000, which, added to $610,- 
400,000, makes a grand total of $915,610,000 given in 



fifteen years by large benefactors to religious, charita- 
ble and educational purposes. We may safely take it 
for granted, I think, that $500,000,000 of this went for 
educational purposes. Southern colleges have not re- 
ceived 2 per cent, of this half a billion of munificence. 
It has been said that the proportion of illiterate voters 
in the South is as great as in 1850 and that 27 per cent, 
of our white population are utterly illiterate. Now we 
have a place between this enormous bulk of material 
wealth on the one side and this pitiable leanness of edu- 
cational equipment on the other to plant our intellectual 
theodolite in order to survey the educational conditions 
of the Southern people. One needs to be gifted with 
no great insight to see the consequences of this unparal- 
leled disproportion between our wheel work for making 
money and our machinery for turning out ideas, be- 
tween our mind and our matter, between our thought 
and our things. We cannot long submit to conditions 
that pamper the body and starve the mind without find- 
ing ere long our center of gravity as a people dropping 
from the top to the bottom of ourselves. With a vast 
mountain of gold on one side of us to enlarge our mate- 
rial interests and a diminutive hill of mental opportun- 
ity on the other to feed our intellectual interests we 
will soon find ourselves like an enormous pyramid, with 
its base in the air and its apex in the dust; we will find 
our feet in the clouds and our spirits sprawling on the 
earth. 

Like an eagle built for the sky, but of set purpose 
failing to grow wings, we will find ourselves, as would 
such a bird of the sun, doomed to the barnyard along 
with the geese and ducks and fowls of the common dirt. 



8 



Greece in the period of her glory transmuted her wealth 
into the moral and intellectual wellbeing of her people 
and raised up leaders in art, philosophy and patriotism 
to guide the race in all ages. Egy^pt in the period of 
her glory converted her wealth into the bodies of her 
people and passed from history without a single valuable 
contribution to the enrichment of mankind. 

Our fathers left us a glorious heritage of ideals, and 
we, the modern sons of noble sires, should not permit 
them to be buried beneath the foundries and factories 
and shops and mills of our coming industrial civiliza- 
tion. Ever}^ dollar that is used to enhance our financial 
wellbeing is to be welcomed, if we can match every 
hundred cents of it with a hundred ideas to dominate it 
and control it in the interests of our higher life. But 
it were better to be poor, as the proverbial turkeys of 
Job, world without end, and still be able to hold up 
our heads and see keenly and clearly and afar with our 
eyes, than to get rich at the expense of intellectual vision, 
moral probity and spiritual health. 

If the South advances in wealth for the next fifty years 
at the same rate that has marked her progress for the 
past ten years we will have among us enough money in 
from 1958, our time is considered, in what esteem will 
an automobile in which to ride, an upholstered car in 
which to cross the continent and a private yacht in which 
to sail the seas, but when, a thousand years in the future 
from J 958, our time is considered, in what esteem will 
we be held, if those who write our history then can find 
nothing better to say of us than that we were the richest 
and at the same time the most stupid people — in pro- 
portion to our advantages — that ever in any age lived 



on the face of the earth? It were better, infinitely, to 
be Diogenes with great visions, living in his tub and with 
independence of soul enough to order Alexander out 
of his light, than to be Croesus, with his soul damp with 
the dews of death, inclosed in a charnel house built out 
of his wealth. Our problems as a section are compli- 
cated by the presence among us of nearly 10,000.000 of. 
colored people. The negroes will continue to be a source 
of irritation and friction and riot in proportion to the 
number of illiterate white people among us. Whatever 
of opposition there is to the negro in the South is found 
among uneducated people. The educated classes owned 
the negro before the war, and they were then, and con- 
tinue to be, his best friends. The negroes understand 
them and they understand the negro. Education of the 
white people is the solution of the so-called negro prob- 
lem. It goes without saying that technical education 
is absolutely necessary as never before in our history. 
From our schools of practical training we are to get our 
captains of industry. 

But most of all we need Christian education, which 
embraces in its discipline not only the hand, specially, 
but also the mind in its universal aspects and the spirit 
in its relations to God and man. Already we are suffer- 
ing from the emphasis placed upon the practical phases 
of education, from those phases which regard man 
simply as a worker in time, in contradistinction from 
those which regard him as a citizen of eternity as well. 
Already the wages of a first-class plumber, brick mason, 
carpenter or engineer is more than twice as much as 
the average pay of a preacher in the North Georgia 
Conference. Dr. Charles F. Aked, pastor of the Fifth 



lO 



Avenue Baptist Church, New York, said in a sermon 
two weeks ago that commerciaHsm was impeding the 
cause of Christianity. He said the pulpit was out of 
touch with the times and that the preachers were coming 
to be a laughing stock because they were compelled to 
live a life of grinding poverty. 

Religious conditions in the neighborhood of New York 
may warrant the startling declaration of Dr. Aked, but 
I do not believe it is true in the South that preachers 
are out of touch with the times, or that they have be- 
come a laughing stock to their neighbors. It is true 
that even here they are compelled to live a life of pov- 
erty, but this fact is matched by the sentiment long 
cherished by the Southern people that the deep humility 
necessary to an ambassador of Heaven can only be 
developed amid the depressing limitations of a liberal 
allowance of poverty. It has been thought to be the 
province of the "Lord to keep the preacher humble, but 
in order to assist Providence in making complete a diffi- 
cult task the people have thought it a part of their 
solemn duty to keep the preacher poor. So between 
what was thought to be the work of the Lord on the one 
side and what was esteemed to be the function of the 
people on the other the clergy of the South have had 
almost unlimited opportunities for accumulating vast 
stores of humility. The Southern people are inclined to 
cherish pity for the preachers because of their poverty ; 
they have never become hard and mean enough to make 
of them a laughing stock because of it. But the times 
have changed. Humanity's life and civilization are larger 
and higher than ever before. Hence the truth and mercy 
and love of the eternal demand on the part of the 



II 



preacher wider intellectual and spiritual gateways to flow 
through than ever before. To discount the preacher's 
message by starving his heart and mind is to close the 
windows of our souls to heaven's light, and to shut from 
our eyes the hills of blessed day. Judicial blindness and 
abysmal night are the portions of that people who put 
out the eyes, stop up the ears and drown by means of 
earthly din the voices of their spiritual prophets. When 
the heart of Savanarola ceased to beat Florence was 
ruined. 

Living as we do in the fairest and richest part of the 
planet, we must know that soon the tide of immigra- 
tion, coming from all lands against our shores, will start 
this way. Already the great steel trust is equipping a 
vast plant in Birmingham, Ala. Millions of the rest- 
less, hungr\', poverty-stricken peoples of the old world 
are coming to live beneath our genial skies and to work 
out their agricultural, commercial and manufacturing 
salvation in our midst. Shall we educate and thus become 
as a people the yeast cake of this foreign dough, forc- 
ing it to rise with our preferences and to take form in 
accordance with our ideals, or shall we neglect the in- 
tellectual and spiritual training of the rising generation 
and thus permit the foreigners to become the yeast cake 
of our native Southern human dough, forcing it to rise 
with their preferences, and to take form in accordance 
with their ideals? Is any one ready to say that the 
Southern people are not able to equip their colleges and 
universities up to the level of those favored institutions 
in the East and North and West? If so, it may be an- 
swered that any people with patience, courage and in- 
domitable energv enough to triumph in a single gener- 



12 



ation over the ravages of the most disastrous war ever 
waged in history, and then when fully on their feet have 
moral force enough soon to eliminate by acts of legis- 
lation a drink bill of nearly a half billion of dollars an- 
nually, have the innate manhood to amaze all mankind 
with what they can do. The Southern people can do 
anything they determine with all their hearts and hands 
and heads to do. They can take their annual drink bill 
if they wish of nearly half a billion of money, about to 
be cut by the force of legislation out of their expense 
account, and put every dollar of it for ten years into 
equipping and endowing their institutions of learning. 
This alone would be enough to make our hill of mental 
opportunity we now see on one side of us as broad and 
high as our vast mountain of gold we see on the other. 



